Leaker Claims AMD Radeon RX 6500XT And RX 6400 Budget RDNA 2 Cards May Be Inbound
Remember when graphics cards had more than two performance tiers, the line-ups were easy to decipher, and you could actually buy one? We remember, and that's why we've been disheartened by the dearth of any display devices below "upper-midrange" in the latest couple of GPU generations. Sure, there was the Radeon RX 5500 (and even an all-but-OEM-only RX 5300 model), as well as the GeForce GTX 1650, but none of those were in particularly long supply—and all are lacking DirectX 12 Ultimate support.
That's why we're cautiously optimistic about today's leak from prominent Japanese Twitter leakster @KOMACHI_ENSAKA. Tweeting vaguely as usual, Komachi mentions an "RX 6500XT" and "RX 6400," elaborating in a quote reply that such cards could be fixed with 4GB of GDDR6 memory.
In later tweets, the mostly-anonymous leaker went on to note that the cards are listed including the model number, and that they might be based on either the last-generation Navi 14 or the as-yet unannounced Navi 24 "Beige Goby" GPU, although Komachi didn't share any information about where or when they might have seen these listings.
This is all pretty vague and unclear, but that's often the nature of these kinds of leaks and rumors. Navi 14 is the same GPU as the aforementioned Radeon RX 5300, and unfortunately will continue to lack DirectX 12 Ultimate support.
On the other hand, we've heard of Beige Goby before, but it hasn't seen release anywhere, yet. These leaks line up with earlier information, and if they're accurate, we'd probably be looking at a very small Radeon GPU with some 1024 shader processors, 16MB of Infinity Cache, and a narrow 64-bit memory bus. Another previous leak indicated that the total graphics power for the top-end Navi 24 model would max out at 50W, although that information was talking about the mobile version.
Still, given how the higher-end RDNA2 Radeons punch well above their weight class, we could be looking at a pretty potent little slot-powered GPU.
